Justin Goeres

For historical reference, Aza Raskin is the son of Jef Raskin (deceased), the father of the Macintosh project at Apple.

Ubiquity is very obviously an outgrowth their work at the Raskin Center. They're doing some really neat thinking & research about how humans relate to data and how computer UIs do(n't) assist in that. Very cool stuff.

If you watch the demos at the Raskin Center (especially the Zooming one, as I recall), you can see parallels with some of Jeff K's ideas and his 2007 NIWeek Keynote where he was talking about using LabVIEW for all levels of system design from top to bottom.

As Aristos Queue warned us last year, the INI key to stop LabVIEW from automatically putting numbers in the corners of your VI icons has changed in LabVIEW 8.6. It is now

UseNumbersForNewVIIcons=FALSE

QUOTE (crelf @ Aug 18 2008, 06:10 AM)

I'm a little confused - do you work for Accurev?

I'm confused, too. This all feels a little bit sockpuppet to me.

I bought Madden 07 when I first got my Wii, and really loved the controls. However, it's a fairly complicated game and I wouldn't necessarily recommend it unless you already like (video-game) football. There's supposedly a sort of "beginner's mode" that EA was really proud of, that's supposed to make it easier for your grandma (i.e. anyone over 30?) to play, but I never tried it out. It looks like for Madden 09 they've added some more new features to try to keep the game approachable for normal humans.

My wife & I both really like Wii Fit, but I don't know if you can find it very easily yet. I got lucky and snagged one at Amazon.

WarioWare: Smooth Moves is another game the wife and I both like. It's not terribly complicated, but it's fast-paced and cartoonish. Might be fun for a drunken party, but we never have drunken parties so I can't be sure , but we've gotten some enjoyment out of it.

Outside of those, I really love my Wii but don't play it all that much, and I don't keep track of what the newest/hottest games are. However, when I get an itch to get something new, I usually just go to metacritic and start reading down the list of highest-scoring games 'til I find one that sounds like something I'd like .

I have not tried any of the downloadable virtual console stuff, because I am a cheap bastard.

EDIT: Anybody who wants to trade Wii numbers send me a PM. For those who don't know, the basic thing this allows us to do (as far as I know) is have our Miis appear in each other's consoles (if we choose) .

I'm dropping in a bit late to this discussion, and most of what I would've said has already been covered. There's just one thing I feel like adding, though.

The original thrust of the discussion was source code control vis-a-vis LabVIEW source files, but something to bear in mind when choosing/deploying a versioning system is that projects typically consist of lots of different types of files, and nearly all of those files can benefit from version control. That's why it has never really bothered me that SVN/TSVN doesn't integrate with the LabVIEW project environment. I see it as a tool for managing all my project-related documents, not just source code. If virtually every file I use for project work can benefit from versioning, then I should have an ex-LabVIEW versioning workflow in my head anyway. I don't feel like I need the process duplicated in the development environment.

In fact, a friend of mine in a totally unrelated field actually used Subversion & TSVN to manage all the revisions of his Master's Thesis and related support documents. The only thing he knows about source files is that they end in things like .c, .h, .vi, etc. and that he never wants a job where he has to touch them .

Other Notes: Even back when I was operating independently, TSVN performed beautifully for me even as a single developer (with an occasional assistant or collaborator). Even the threat of merge conflicts just forces clear communication between developers, which is a very good thing. What's more, Subversion/TSVN are pretty light-weight, so it was always a snap to install them on a customer's computer to do a project checkout on-site when necessary.

QUOTE (jgcode @ Aug 12 2008, 04:07 PM)

Better than travelling on a Canadian Greyhound bus.

That's exactly what I thought when I originally heard that story: "Wow, it's good I got off that bus in Minneapolis."

For even more fun, this is the user page for the person who made that video (not the person who posted the one I originally linked).

If you're into watching this sort of psychological train wreck (I know I am, but I feel a little dirty afterwards ), check out the one where invisible waves are rocking her house, and also the one about the moon.

QUOTE (jgcode @ Aug 8 2008, 04:29 PM)

Anyone experienced this before with USB DAQmx and a VM?

I've not yet used any USB DAQmx hardware with VMWare on my MacBook Pro.

I did try some USB DAQmx stuff about 18 months ago with a beta of Parallels and had lots of weird problems. Basically, the only real solution was to keep the device unplugged until I needed it, plug it in, and then unplug it again and unmap/remap the serial port in Parallels every time I shut down my app. I doubt the situation is still that bad (it was a beta, after all), but that's my only data point.

Sorry I can't be of more help. Eventually I will know more about this kind of thing .

Alas, I normally code in silence. Occasionally I'll put on something without lyrics, and I went through a phase a few years ago when I liked to code to techno/electronica.

The problem is that the same part of my brain that likes music seems to also be involved in coding, and I get really distracted by the music. Then I have to pick up one of my cats and dance around the room with it, and that's more than you wanted to hear anyway, so I'll stop.

Pretty compelling evidence! :ninja:

It reminds me that I didn't get to tell my story at NIWeek this year about the time I spent 6 hours on a Greyhound bus with a crack whore and a conspiracy theorist. :beer:

Oh, sweet Jesus...

OK, just for the record, that picture is from NIWeek 2007. It's not from last week.

And I'm not really asleep .

QUOTE (Ton @ Aug 1 2008, 01:11 PM)

Another reason not to go to NI week.

Justin smells.

I feel like I should have a witty retort to this, but I don't.

QUOTE (Christina Rogers @ Jul 30 2008, 08:19 AM)

Actually, they screwed up thrice which is why I gave up on them being able to handle this order correctly.

CafePress http://www.cafepress.com/cp/info/sell/' rel='nofollow' target="_blank">stores are free now, but if everyone else is happy with zazzle, then stick with what works.

This is sort of orthogonal to the discussion, but I have also had an issue with the quality of the only Zazzle shirt I've ordered in the past. Specifically, the screenprinting on it (a black line drawing on a grey long-sleeved t-shirt) faded really fast. It was noticeably faded after a single trip through the washer.

I have a couple LAVA shirts and also another Zazzle shirt I just got, but have been very careful washing them so far (and only washed each one once or twice). It will be interesting to see how they hold up.

I'm arriving the weekend before to visit relatives and staying through Thursday night. :beer:

QUOTE (LV_FPGA_SE @ Jul 24 2008, 10:58 AM)

As any good NIWeek attendee can attest to, room temperature in Austin in August is around 60 degrees. A sweater or sweatshirt is recommended. :beer: :thumbup:

Which is roughly half the temperature outside, where a bikini is recommended.

QUOTE (Aristos Queue @ Jul 15 2008, 02:31 PM)

Objection not accepted on the grounds that two VIs with the same name should be performing the same operation. If the parent class has a method called "Dot Product.vi" and the children also need a method named "Dot Product.vi", then the children are presumably overriding their parent's behavior -- thus the method should be dynamic dispatch, not static dispatch, and there's no problem. If the children are not overriding -- and thus the desire is for static dispatch -- then the VIs have no business being named the same thing. The reason for the "can't have same name as static in parent" rule is that the functionality "Dot Product" has been defined by the parent and the child must accept that or it isn't really a proper child.

Point taken, at least for the scope of the problem you're proposing.

This occurs more often for me with set/get methods, where one class will have a data member named Port that's say, a VISA resource, while a sibling of it has an item named Port that's a TCP/IP port number. But since you outlawed accessor methods in Rule #9, that's orthogonal to the problem.

QUOTE (Aristos Queue @ Jul 15 2008, 11:22 AM)

[*]This restriction is really not applicable to LabVIEW, since we don't type the text names of VIs. But the sentiment about naming your VIs well is still relevant. Don't abbreviate names. This constraint avoids the procedural verbosity that is created by certain forms of redundancy—if you have to type the full name of a method or variable, you're likely to spend more time thinking about its name. And you'll avoid having objects called Order with methods entitled shipOrder(). Instead, your code will have more calls such as Order.ship(). In LabVIEW, if you have a class named Matrix, you might have a member VI named DotProduct.vi. You should not name it MatrixDotProduct.vi

I would register a minor objection to this one, because LabVIEW won't allow static methods in a class to have the same name as static methods in an ancestor or child class. I regularly name VIs things like "Matrix Dot Product.vi" (if it was a member of Matrix.lvclass) instead of "Dot Product.vi" simply to prevent myself from clobbering that name later.

The overarching point about naming, however, is still relevant.

QUOTE (Val Brown @ Jul 14 2008, 10:23 AM)

But I also think we're seeing some tribal identities emerging here in this thread.

That's a really interesting point. :thumbup:

QUOTE (Darren @ Jul 13 2008, 09:18 PM)

Ok, at the risk of seemingly hopelessly un-hip, is there some sort of pop culture reference I'm missing with this? I'm all about funny web phenomenons, but I'm completely lost here...

On the contrary, I think it's actually a bunch of equally un-hip conference geeks laughing themselves silly over something that's only funny in their context . And I mean that in the nicest possible way, even though that sort of thing never, ever happens at NIWeek .

Besides,

http://lavag.org/old_files/monthly_07_2008/post-2992-1216043006.png' target="_blank">

...and I didn't get any pop culture references in it, either.

QUOTE (crelf @ Jul 11 2008, 03:53 PM)

Not at all - it just means that she didn't bake them for long enough - you're suggesting that the loaves of bread are the "system", whereas it could be much much larger than that I suggest she bake a loaf for an infinite amount of time and then we'll look at the results...

But the bread is sooooo tasty. I hope the universe survives long enough for me to eat it.

My wife made two loaves of bread last night with chocolate chips in them. But despite thorough mixing, approximately 80% of the chips ended up in one loaf.

I am concerned that this means the entropy of the universe may be decreasing and THE SECOND LAW OF THERMODYNAMICS HAS BEEN REPEALED.

How big a problem is this?

QUOTE (normandinf @ Jul 11 2008, 04:40 AM)

Kilometers of wires is cool, but it is too dependant on screen size...

That might trigger an habit of buying larger LCDs right before yearly evaluation period.

That problem could easily be solved by just calculating the lengths in pixels, and then adding scaling parameters for physical screen size and resolution. If anyone is feeling really clever, you might even be able to get that information from the OS.

On the other hand, it would be easy to take a poll or two to find the most common screen size & screen resolution on LAVA, and call that the standard LAVA screen. Then diagrams could be measured in standard LAVA kilometers.

This hamster deserves a Mindstorms NXT set more than any other hamster on the planet.

QUOTE (Norm Kirchner @ Jul 9 2008, 01:35 PM)

Haven't you realized after years of Sci-fi movies, Clones will never be perfect replicates of the original. There will always be some kind of flaw on purpose or by accident.

Just ask http://www.blacksheep-themovie.com/' rel='nofollow' target="_blank">New Zealand.

I think PJM's free shipping code expired, but I just placed an order (July 8) with both these codes:

ZAZZLESUNFUN << $5 an order of $50 or more.

CUSTOMER1006 << free shipping (apparently no minimum order)

FYI, I got the codes from RetailMeNot.

EDIT: I wasted my 500th post on this .

I agree, there making it sound like their market share is increasing

It's not an "IBM clone" when it runs OS X. And "expensive" is debatable and subjective. I don't know about you, but I buy the best tools for my job.

QUOTE

I'm not exactly sure what you mean by that. Apple has been in the "PC market" for over 20 years.

Unless by "PC market" you mean the low-margin, commodity computer hardware market where Dell/Lenovo/etc. live. That's not a market Apple has ever cared about. The failure of the press and the "market analysts" to understand that is something that continues to astound me.